Arianna: McCain Told Me He Didn't Vote for Bush in 2000

May 6, 2008

By ED OKEEFE

Arianna Huffington writes that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told her several years ago that he didn't vote for George W. Bush for president in 2000."Not true," says a McCain aide. "Consider the source."Arianna's story: "At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. 'I didn't vote for George Bush' the man confessed. 'I didn't either,' his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband)."The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush -- both literally and metaphorically -- he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn't stomach voting for in 2000."Whom do you believe?- jpt